Business for Engineers: 'Almost Acceptable' the New Good?

There are some truly good products, but all too often we accept mediocrity. It's time to do away with "almost adequate" and make "good" mean what it says.

Business is complicated and full of compromises, whether we like it or not, but some compromises make the whole system fail.

As engineers, we often focus our efforts on the details of a product design. Some engineers specialize in blank-slate design. Others focus on test and quality engineering. Still others provide expert guidance for manufacturing processes. It seems that, no matter what the industry, "almost acceptable" products have become the norm for what we collectively have come to believe is "good."

I'm not saying that every component of every product isn't good. But to me, "product" means my entire experience, from researching for products to selecting candidate solutions to purchasing the chosen product to receiving it. For me, a failure in any part of this supply chain engagement results in, at best, an almost acceptable product.

I've recently encountered a series of almost acceptable products -- not because the items themselves were poorly designed or manufactured, but because other aspects of the product experience were unacceptable.

A year ago, a company with which I was consulting received a sample of a PCIe chassis, backplane, and enclosure. The fit and finish were excellent -- the sheet metal was bright plated, and the seams were welded. This was a great solution for a new design challenge to repackage a research machine into a commercially acceptable enclosure. Based on experience, I thought this enclosure would give us a fighting chance to pass electromagnetic emissions standards for the new machine. We ordered a chassis and enclosure based on the sample unit we'd evaluated. What we received was vastly different from the evaluation unit.

I recently had dinner with executives from the company, and I asked about the change. They were surprised by the difference in what we'd evaluated and what we received. It seems that we had evaluated a Mil-Spec chassis and enclosure, but our understanding was that it was the commercial unit. We subsequently discovered that the salesperson had ordered a commercial evaluation unit, but evidently a Mil-Spec counterpart had been shipped by mistake. The jury is out on this almost adequate product. The executives inform me that the commercial unit with the same essential electronics that we use passes FCC part B. We'll see.

How about another almost adequate product? I recently received a single-board computer with a dual Xeon processor and 48 GB of DDR3 RAM. It's a powerful board that can handle the data it will be required to process. It's pretty nice for a dual-slot board. The only problem is that it isn't really a dual-slot card. Yes, the card itself occupies two slots of the PCIe backplane, but the cabling from the peripherals in the front of the enclosure requires another two slots. Also, perhaps the missed failure in this case is the fact that the custom heat sink requires cooling fans to be placed on top of the heat sink. The supplier's answer? "Customers put a short board next to this card for airflow."

I said complete a few business courses along with your engineering courses; I did not say anything about an MBA. I still think engineering or computer science is the way to go for the future. It has worked very well for me all these years. But we do need to encourage our future engineers to keep up with changing times. A few business courses will never hurt a future engineer, that's my point.

Back in ancient times, the school I received my BSEE from had a REQUIRED course called "Engineering Economics." This introduced the concepts of life cycle costs, amortization, ROI, etc. which back then ENGINEERS were expected to include in their analyses of various proposals, etc. THAT was the 'business side" we ALL were exposed to and expected to be competent in. Many major companies then had engineers as top management. Now, of course, we all suffer the phenomenon of MBAs running things; however, there are numerous "flavors" of MBAs. The major offenders (IMHO) are the "finance" flavor types, all of whom expect to attain 8-figure compensation as their reward for surviving a year or two of graduate business school. These are the ones who think they know everything they need to know to do anything, and anyone who disgarres is an enemy to be gotten rid of as soon as possible. More than anyone else, they have presided over the precipitous decline in the state of manufacturing and many other businesses in the US over the past 3 decades or so.

Engineering applauded the other departments and often cheered, especially the School of Nursing. We only booed Business. The School of Business made a feeble attempt to boo us back, but obviously the Booing Committee hadn't met to develop a Booing Policy and few biz grads wanted to take independent initiative :-)

Update: On a happier note, this was the first year the band played the "Bud Song" at graduation, which became a yearly tradition. Alert readers will immediately recognize the school :-)

I got my BSEE from a large USA univeristy. The graduation ceremony was likewise large, and part of the ceremony was that the graduates from each department were invited to rise in turn and be cheered and cheer for themselves. When the School of Business rose, the School of Engineering spontaneously booed. Wow.

I should mention that this was back when IBM still had its Full Employment Practice (i.e., no layoffs), Hewlett-Packard was still considered a great place for an engineer to work and retire from, and industry had not yet embraced the Harvard MBA concept of treating all employees as cheap commodities to be outsourced or discarded at will: "We use them and we throw them away -- like Kleenex."

Being forced to take a business course would have made me very unhappy, and I suspect most of my fellow engineering students would have felt the same way. Instead, I think the course we really need is "Defence Against the Dark Arts of MBAs" :-)

Your article does make a valid point.The problem is that many engineering students are not required to complete a business course in college.But, business is everywhere.Some engineering schools are starting to take a closer look at this.It is my hope that some college administrators are visiting this site and reading our posting.